Lightning Ridge, Australia

Images and Text by Creative Director Ben Bloom

Once an opal mining hub, now a slightly forgotten but nevertheless eccentric part of the Australian Outback.

The town sits nine hours from any large body of water. Besides a communal hot spring reminiscent of a pre-war bath house with an Australian twist, the landscape is dry; brown and gray as far as the eye can see, occasionally interrupted by a hot burst of Bougainvillea’s.

Our motel was somewhere between kitschy and creepy, a series of single story log cabins with a pub in the middle that seemed to host the majority of the town each night. Most people were friendly, some were not. But ignorance is bliss and I was ignorant.

With most of my time spent steps from the ocean, there’s something about the uninhabitable disposition of the desert that feels magnetizing. Maybe a sense of transient depersonalization, rumbling down a gravel road on the 1200 Sportster, flanked by a terrified emu and a pack of wild horses.

The rest of the world seems to fall away and all you can think about is whether or not your sweaty hands might slip off the grips on one of those potholes and send you into the next dream.

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